James D. Torr

I've been curious what drove our health care system to Managed Care. I wanted to find out what happened to our health care system that made things so different from when I was a kid. This book answered that question.

It was an interesting setup. Various people wrote opinions on a number of healthcare topics. Each topic had several opposing viewpoints. Like FoxNews says, "We report, you decide." They explored topics such as, "Is there a crisis?", "How do we fix health care?", "Is Canada's system a good model?".

All in all, I learned a lot about the factors that caused our health care system to go from a fee-for-service to a managed-care system. Here's what I think. The reason medical professionals are so upset about managed care is because for years they've had a blank check to do whatever procedures they wanted. Useless or not, insurance companies would never say no. The medical business went from 8% of the GNP to 13%. Things were spiralling out of control. Enter managed care. Doctors were suddenly being watched. They now had to justify their decisions. No more blank check.

I enjoyed this book simply because the viewpoints were fairly short. Less than 5 pages. The book itself was a small paperback. Very easy to read. I would recommend it to anyone wanting to learn why we got into this mess, and how we should fix it. If it needs fixing at all.… (mere)